


I'll Eat You Up, I Love You So

by synergenic (Losseflame)



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Canon Divergent, F/M, M/M, Multi, about everyone banging everyone, but then it grew a plot and angst so, this was supposed to be a lighthearted fic, welcome to the tangled web of dysfunction that is the Recon Corps
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-10-20
Updated: 2013-10-20
Packaged: 2017-12-29 22:42:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 20,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1010986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Losseflame/pseuds/synergenic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Monogamy is for a world where your life expectancy is more than double your current age, and sometimes things get complicated.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Armin can immediately tell when it changes between Eren and Mikasa, in a single glance at the two when they first meet in the morning. One morning they are not lovers, the next morning they are, and Armin thinks that this is it, the thing that they will share that he never will. He resigns himself to a permanent empty spot in his heart, a slightly deadened piece of his soul, and then resides himself to following them everywhere, in case they became like every other pair in love.

By that, he means losing their minds for each other; he’s seen couples in love, and if there is one thing they all have in common it’s that they’re stupid. Armin isn’t bitter or cynical at all – he wants to fall in love, too, (has already fallen in love, twice over, really, but he likes to ignore that), it’s just – 

Well, it’s just an observation. 

And it’s not that he’s jealous, either – he’s not, he swears – but he’s not quite sure he can love anyone else anymore and Armin doesn’t deal well with loneliness. This almost guarantees him loneliness, even if he does take Jean up on his wandering eyes. 

Sometimes he thinks about those eyes when he’s jerking off, facedown and biting the pillow because he’s not shameless like most of the boys in the dorm. The barriers have dissolves, mostly, because they’re so close to graduating and they’ve all been fucking _someone_ so they’ve been caught at least once, but Armin likes what he does in the night to stay between him and the darkness.

He thinks about Jean, fucking him, holding him down, maybe making him scream if his cockiness is actually honesty. It’d always be Jean fucking him, because Jean is one of those assholes who thinks who tops is determined by muscle mass, but Armin’s fine with that. There are only communal showers here, and Armin has seen Jean’s cock, and – 

Armin’s fine with that.

When his hand is on his dick and he’s about to come and he’s not sure if the pillow between his teeth is totally muffling his whines he thinks about Jean’s wandering eyes, he does, but he also thinks about how he can almost hear an answering catch of breath on Eren’s side of the double bunk bed, soft, quietly wet noises coming from his best friend’s general pelvic area. 

There’s no fooling himself – Eren is in love with Mikasa, forever; they still manage to meet in empty areas and fuck regularly, they still share the looks that hold thousands of words. Eren is not in love with Armin, though Armin knows Eren loves him.

Eren is not in love with Armin, but Eren does want him.

…

It started because Eren was having another nightmare – he was hungry, he was always so hungry but no matter how much meat he ate he was always hungrier still – and he woke up after he crawled into the ribcage of a monstrous woman and ate her heart with an ache in his crotch and his eyes opened to find Mikasa with the hem of her nightgown and the edge of her blankets at her waist. One hand was under pink fabric at her breasts that were just starting to grow, the other was moving between her spread thighs and pointy knees, tenting the ratty covers.

As soon as he sucked in a breath in reaction to the heat that boils between his hips and under the skin of his mouth that the sight brings, Mikasa’s eyes flick open and to his. Her hand only paused a moment before it moved faster, lips parting and neck arching over her thin pillow.

“Lick your hand and touch it,” Mikasa said, and Eren frowned.

“I know what I’m supposed to do,” he grumbled, even though he didn’t until now. It’s not that he hadn’t felt it, before, but touching his penis when it was like this made him feel guilty, somehow, in a weird, wordless way that curdled in his gut and leaked out his skin. But Mikasa’s gaze felt good on him, made the brush of his fingertips against his stomach hot and lustful, and when they circled around his dick he groaned and turned his head into his arm, though he kept his eyes on her. 

It didn’t last long, because Mikasa was already almost finished and Eren was a quick shot in everything, and afterward they fell asleep quickly, but things were different between them, the next morning. Warmer.

Armin noticed, of course Armin noticed, and when he did Eren thought of Armin touching him the way he touched himself with a gasp that felt like a punch to the gut, and he thought dizzily to himself that he was fucked.

…

It starts because Jean walks in on Armin fucking Johan, a pretty boy with whipcord muscles who will die at Trost in ten months, right when Armin’s hips are starting to stutter, the heat in the base of his gut slipping into his veins and burning him alive. They – he and Jean, he means; Armin likes Johan, but Armin will be honest with himself in saying that Johan’s as much as a means to an end as he is anything else – are at just the right angle so that when Jean stumbles into the supplies shack looking for a private place to rub one out his eyes almost immediately fall to Armin’s, just as Armin is tipping his head back and _moaning_. 

 

And Armin is not clueless, not like some people think – he can see the way Jean’s lips part, the way his hand curls over his crotch and the way his eyes snap to where Armin’s cock is exposed, before he shakes his head and mumbles an apology, backing out again. Heaving out a breath, Armin slumps over Johan’s back and kisses his ear, his cheek, his lips, holding him to indulge Johan’s affection for cuddling. They’ve fucked a couple times now; it would be rude to ignore what he knows Johan likes. 

“Mm,” Johan murmurs, twisting his head to better catch Armin’s kiss. “Tell me if it’s good.” He sighs when Armin bites, when Armin sucks at an already-swollen bottom lip. 

“If what’s good?” Armin asks, pulling out and turning Johan so that he’s leaning with his back to the table. Sliding to his knees to suck Johan off, Armin revels for a moment in his wordlessness, his gasping, needy breaths – Johan has a quicksilver tongue that won’t stop dancing; being able to shut him up, even in bed, had taken practice – before Johan half-moans, half-laughs. With a sharp, delicious tug at Armin’s hair, Johan pulls Armin’s mouth off his cock, holding up one hand to wait.

“If fucking Jean is good.” And then the hand that was pulling Arming away is now pushing him back, and Armin parts his lips for it, shivers at the sensation of being wanted, being _useful_ , even if it’s for this.

Johan takes a long time to come and likes to spit obscenities, snarl out vulgar things he’d do to Armin if he had the space and the time, and Armin comes again, frantically, his had moving between his thighs as his head moves between Johan’s. 

“Such a good boy,” Johan sighs once he’d finally yanked Armin away, once Armin had suckled at him till he was twitching. “Such a fuckin’ slut.” 

Armin shivers again, rolls his face into Johan’s thigh and wonders where he learned to speak like that, make words that would sound awkward coming from any other piss-poor fifteen-year-old with a death wish sound rough and hot. 

They don’t make Jean a discussion – they don’t need to. Neither of them are keeping to one another, and neither of them will think about broaching the subject with the other. 

Monogamy is for a world where your life expectancy is higher than double your current age – if you’re lucky. 

-

The next day, when Armin sits down to breakfast he is met with Eren’s wide, burning gaze, eyes sweeping over Armin with molten metal in them. Armin can’t tell if it’s anger or fear or curiosity – it could be any of them, because Eren is prone to nightmares and emotions that take over any logic he has. So, with his greeting dying a slow, un-mourned death in the back of his throat, Armin settles across from Eren and Mikasa, as he usually does, and latches his eyes onto the table, eating his breakfast quietly. 

If it’s anger or curiosity, Armin will hear about it soon enough, and if it’s fear, Armin won’t, which says enough anyway. 

“Oh, ahahaha, Armin, you missed a spot in your shower!” Sasha laughs as she sits next to him, adjusting his collar and covering the hickey Armin forgot about until this moment. Ruining her already transparent attempt at subtlety, Sasha grins a wide, manic grin at him, nudging his arm as Johan walks by. 

No one is sure how Sasha knows, intuitively, who’s fucking who and when they’re doing the fucking, but like many things about Sasha, they’ve learned to take in in stride, accepting it the same way they accept the shitty food and the sadistic instructors and their likelihood of early demise – as reality. 

Armin’s train of thought is interrupted by the slow creak of wood, everyone stiffening and turning to look at where Mikasa’s knuckles are wrapped around the edge of table, going white as they tighten. “Did he hurt you?” Mikasa says, quietly, evenly. Some might say calmly, if they didn’t know the girl. 

“Ah, no, Mikasa, it’s not like that –” Armin starts with a wavering laugh, covering the mark with a palm that tingles with shyness. It doesn’t stop the curdling of heat under his skin when Mikasa’s eyes linger on his hand, looking right at where the bruise is. 

(Mikasa could give him better ones, Armin thinks; Mikasa and Eren with their blunt smiles and sharp teeth could give him better ones.)

“Did you _want_ it?” she hisses now, and _oh_ – Armin understands. What his downturned eyes and slumped shoulders might look like with the mark at his neck, when the person looking didn’t know it was to avoid Eren’s gaze.

_Oh_ – Armin’s breath catches, and his body goes loose with affection as he leans forward, placing his hand over Mikasa’s and squeezing. “Yes, Mikasa, don’t worry.” He waits until she meets his eyes, waits longer still till her palm turns upward and her fingers squeeze his back, before squeezing her hand once more and returning to his food. 

The table has fallen silent in the wake of this reaction, and sometimes Armin forgets what the three of them look like to others, to the ones who hadn’t lived in Wall Maria and didn’t have to survive afterward. 

A choked, indignant noise emanates from Eren’s open mouth, and Armin looks to see Eren staring at him as if he’d grown a secondary face in his right cheek. “ _Why_?” 

Eren’s question is syrupy with derision, his glower darkening alarmingly in the time that it takes for Armin to catch up to what his best friend was asking. When Armin does, he pauses, stumbling over what seems like it should be an easy answer. 

“Oi, Jaeger, Armin can do what he wants, yeah? You don’t own his dick.” Jean’s drawl sounds out behind Armin as the boy leans back from his table to join the conversation. Their eyes meet, for a moment, and Jean’s gaze drags down to Armin’s lips before he turns back to Eren. Eren, who at this moment is flushing with clenched fists, and Armin can sense the amount of inordinate anger Jean’s comment caused from across the tabletop. 

Shifting his weight, he puts himself more fully between Eren and Jean.

“I know that,” Eren glowers, chin jutting out in the childish way it always does when he’s angry enough.

“Then what’s the problem?” Jean asks, and his voice is _smug_. He’s close enough that Armin can smell the boy-sweat-musk-sex scent of him, close enough that Armin can see how the hair at the nape of Jean’s neck is gathering sweat, can see the divot in his clavicle Armin wants to worry at with his teeth. With a tick in his jaw, Eren visibly swallows words – perhaps motivated by the hand Mikasa has resting on his knee – and shakes his head slightly.

“Nothing.” The word comes from gritted teeth. “There isn’t a problem.” 

Jean grins slowly, tips back towards his table but manages to brush Armin’s hair with his lips before he does. “Good.”

-

“You didn’t have to make him mad,” Armin calls out to Jean later that night.

Jean pivots on a heel, looks Armin up and down with eyes that don’t bother to hide anything. It makes Armin feel shaky, almost, fragile; no one has looked at Armin as if Armin is the only thing worth looking at that Armin can remember and it puts a shiver in his knees, a questioning, wanting tremble in his bones. 

“I didn’t say it for him, Arlert,” Jean drawls, and Armin doesn’t ask what that means when Jean turns away and keeps walking to the boy’s cabin. 

…

There was an annoyingly realistic edge to the physicality of actual sex that Eren thought he could have done without, and he was trapped by this discovery as he looked down at Mikasa’s – and what was he supposed to call it? Vagina made him feel a clinical discomfort, and cunt was used too often in the streets as an insult to feel appropriate, and pussy just reminded him of the old lady who used to live close to his home with a battalion of cats she called ‘pussy-kitties’. 

And now he was too aware of his sweaty palms, of how he probably should have pissed before this, of how neither he nor Mikasa have had a chance to bath properly in weeks as one part of Shadis’s sadistic routine of breaking them down and they can smell that fact in the air.

“Fuckin’ –” he muttered, adjusting his weight on the floor of the equipment room and freezing along with Mikasa when that makes the floorboards groan.

“What is it?” Mikasa asked after a breathless, silent moment, wiggling her hips impatiently when Eren’s fingers stayed at her knees instead of creeping down her thighs like she expected. 

“Did we have to do this now?” Eren mumbled as he struggled first with his own buckles, then with Mikasa’s shirt once she’d slapped his hands away and started on the task of undressing him.

“Yes,” Mikasa said, neatly undoing the buttons on his shirt and kissing the skin this revealed. She bit at Eren’s nipple just to hear him hiss out a curse and grab at her hair to keep her there. “We agreed we both wanted to, I’m not ovulating, and after this we’ll have training in the mountains, which will give us no free time until I’m ovulating again.”

Her tone was methodical, as were her movements. One hand was placed in front of Eren’s mouth; unthinkingly, he licked her palm and groaned when she pushed him back and wrapped her hand around his dick, leaning back to watch what it did to him. Always more practical than he, she used this time to kick off the last leg of her pants, shrugging away her shirt in a smooth gesture and Eren didn’t stop himself from reaching her waist and tugging her closer when the fabric reaches the ground, tucking his face against her chest.

And he liked…he liked boys, liked thinking about the hard shape of their shoulders and the flat planes of their chest, liked thinking about – about cocks that weren’t his own, the weight and warmth of them in his hand, between his lips, pushing at the back of his throat…

But with Mikasa gripping at him as she sank down, the lips of her parting to let his head inside, Eren could understand, really, the obsession with girls everyone in the dorm seemed to share except for him. Because Mikasa had bits that bounced when she moved up and down on him, that heaved when he ran nails down her back, and there was slick, tight, _hot_ muscle around Eren’s cock, that spasmed and fluttered when he rocked his hips with hers.

“Oh, oh _God_ , Mikasa –” Eren groaned, pressing his face into the weight of one of her tits before biting at the nipple there, like she did him. This made her yelp, and Eren almost backed up, stuttering apologies, before her fingers knotted his hair and she yanked him back to her chest.

Heat knotted itself between Eren’s hips and coiled tighter when Mikasa bent her back to press her lips to Eren’s ear. “Armin,” she sighed as Eren bit and sucked at her chest, jerking her hips down hard to meet his upward thrust, “Eren, imagine if _Armin_ –”

Eren didn’t get a chance to imagine, because as Mikasa’s voice arched into a moan over Armin’s name, Eren felt his orgasm come to him like a blow, leaving him wordless and mindless as he pictured Armin rocking back onto him, head tipped back just like Mikasa’s. 

When Eren came back to himself, Mikasa still had him, flaccid, inside her, tightening around him desperately as her fingers moved against her clit, desperate little sounds fluttering in her throat.

“’Ll do it,” Eren mumbled, pushing her hand away and replacing her fingertips with his own, rubbing in practiced circular motions until Mikasa seized and shuddered, both hands gripping his wrist.

Then she lifted herself off him, a soft whine escaping her when his cock slipped from between her lips. Shuffling, she moved so that they were sitting beside one another, and linked their sticky fingers together.

“We should tell Armin,” Mikasa murmured simply, leaning forward to grab her scarf and wrap it around her neck one-handed. It made a funny picture, Eren thought, Mikasa naked except for the fucking scarf, but her words stopped him from laughing. 

“No,” he said, panic making his voice break. Mikasa turned to him with a questioning frown, and Eren tripped over his words, half-formed syllables stumbling from his mouth without permission. It’s just – Armin _loved_ them, Eren knew, loved them more than he loved anything else, but Eren also knew that Armin didn’t want them, not how they wanted him, and –

Armin loved them enough to fake it, if he knew, and Eren didn’t want to think about having Armin in him, around him, because of Armin’s stupid sense of obligation.

“I – Mikasa, I can’t –” Eren stuttered until Mikasa took pity on him, raising a hand for him to stop.

“Alright,” she said, and Eren didn’t have to know her as well as he did to see the disappointment in her eyes. 

…

Mikasa has never had to use her full strength against Eren, not to break up a fight or drag him away from someone before a fight can start. Never once, because it felt almost to her like blasphemy, to use what she uses to keep him alive to restrain him. 

Now she has no choice, and she reminds herself of that when she can almost feel Eren’s skin bruise beneath her fingers. 

“Let me go, Mikasa,” Eren hisses, venom clinging to the words, surging against the hands on his forearm with his eyes locked on –

Locked on the sight of Jean and Armin moving against one another, Armin’s hands braced on the waist-high box in front of him and Jean pressing up along his back with every thrust, arms tender where they curl around Armin. 

“No,” Mikasa breathes, both in response to Eren’s words and in reaction to what she sees. Torn between the slow, aching rise of emptiness in her chest and the twist of heat between her hips, Mikasa thinks that she should leave, give Jean and Armin room for privacy and herself and Eren room to grieve, but –

But Armin is so beautiful, his eyes open and unfocused as he moans, head tipped back on Jean’s shoulder and Jean scatters kisses along his neck, biting down when Armin gives a pleased whine at being treated rougher.

(And this is almost enough for Mikasa to drop her hold on Eren and push Jean away herself – if Armin needs to be treated rough, _she_ should be the one to give him that, _she’s_ the one who knows him and his limits best, Jean could misstep so _easily_ –)

Jean has never looked so tender, though, so close to kindness as he holds Armin’s hips still to roll into the boy slowly, deeply, laugh catching in his throat when it makes Armin bend just so, push himself back just so. 

“Fuck, Armin, _fuck_ –” Jean punctuates each word with a short thrust forward, making Armin’s long moan hiccup. Grasping at Armin’s hair, he _pulls_ , pulls until Armin is arched against Jean’s front, neck bent and eyes wide when Jean kisses him. “So damn gorgeous, you –” 

Armin has shied away from the sweet talk, gaze shuttering, and Jean makes a hard sound in his throat, a hand spreading along Armin’s neck and jaw as he _forces_ eye contact. “Every time I fuckin’ see you all I can think is how good you look like this, with me, all fucked and desperate.” 

Eren breathes out a wounded noise and stops struggling when he sees how this makes Armin soften, pressing his face into the crook of Jean’s neck with a flush in his cheeks. Mikasa can feel the sight echo in her own chest, and she bites her lip to keep from gasping at how obvious Armin’s affection for Jean is. 

“Yeah,” Jean says, fucking up into Armin as Armin’s voice hitches against his neck. “So good for me, aren’t you? Y’think that no one notices, shit –” Jean gasps, his voice slurring the closer he gets to coming, “But I – oh, _fuck_ – I know you, I know how good you are –”

He doesn’t speak anymore, hunching over Armin and finishing in a few more thrusts, and both Eren and Mikasa tense when the feel of that is what pushes Armin over, gasping and shuddering his way through.

There is silence, after, when Jean is still slumped over Armin, and it’s in that silence that Eren seems to realize how loud his breathing is, how close he and Mikasa are to them, how few boxes are hiding them from view. That doesn’t stop his mouth from moving soundlessly over words Mikasa doesn’t know but can guess at, or how he turns to her with his palms open and out, his eyes asking her to fix this.

Because – because when Armin hadn’t wanted anyone the way she and Eren wanted him, it was bearable, she thinks, watching him touch and find pleasure in other people. But Armin loves Jean, Mikasa thinks mournfully; it hadn’t been hard to read that in how his hands gripped Jean’s, how he softened himself under Jean’s weight. 

Armin loves Jean, and when both Mikasa and Eren fully come to this conclusion with hard, pained breaths, Jean looks up and meets Eren’s eyes with a slow, lazy smile, his hand dragging through Armin’s hair gently.

Eren makes a sound that tastes like loss in the air, and then he is dragging Mikasa away from the scene, his breathes catching rough in his throat in what will soon be sobs.

Mikasa stumbles, when he does so – and it is funny, that after all these years of absolute control, after gaining strength to kill monsters, it is a slight, beautiful boy who breaks her.

…

Jean sneaks them back into the cabin, after, and Armin is tired enough that Jean has to quietly shuffle his limbs into sleep clothes, guide him to the ladder at his bunk with warm hands on his waist.

“Goodnight,” Jean whispers, his breath hot on Armin’s neck. Even through his tiredness, Armin shivers, patting Jean’s hand.

“You, too,” Armin mumbles, heaving his weight sleepily up the creaky wooden ladder.

Eren is already there, his back to Armin, his rhythmic breathing painfully fake, and when Armin braces his knees on the mattress to crawl into his spot, Eren’s shoulders tense. The sound of his breath hitches in the clipped way it only does when he is angry, frustrated, hissing from between his teeth.

He heard Armin and Jean’s exchange. 

Stomach dropping, Armin tentatively puts his hand on Eren’s shoulder, only to have it shaken off roughly. 

“Don’t _touch_ me,” Eren bites out. There is bitterness in his words, a hurt, accusatory, angry bitterness that makes Armin feel as though he has begun rotting from the inside out – the way he always does when Eren is angry at him.

The desperate instinct to fix this, to grovel and beg and plead until Eren is happy with him again is burning Armin’s blood, pushing any thought of sleep through the pores of his skull. 

“Eren…” Armin whispers, implores into the empty space between them. It makes Eren’s shoulder hunch further, hands shaking as he yanks the blankets further up his side and sighs, back still facing Armin. “What did I do?”

A short burst of quiet, somewhat hysterical laughter is muffled by the hand Eren brings to his mouth, and now Eren turns to face him. “You still smell like Jean’s _dick_ and you’re asking me that?” 

Eren’s features are stretched into the venomous, internalized anger Armin recognizes well – Eren lashes out with it, most times, and Armin knows that that’s what his words were but that doesn’t stop a wounded sound from choking it’s way out his mouth.

“I thought – I thought you said –” He stumbles to bring up what was said when he and Johan were still seeing one another, but Eren is shaking his head rigorously.

“He’s a prick, and – and what if he’s only using you to get to Mikasa, you know he’s been trying –”

“Shut up,” Armin says, angry at last, because that’s what it comes down to, in the end – there is Eren and Mikasa, and then there is Armin, and Armin is only the afterthought, the short cut, to the rest of the world, always. “Shut up, maybe he just wants me, unlike everyone else maybe he just wants me –” 

Now Eren draws in a crackling, heaving gasp that sounds like a _whine_ , and then – 

Then his hands are fisted in Armin’s shirt and he’s dragging him over and _God_ , his mouth is so warm on Armin’s, one of his thighs wedging itself between the blond boy’s and Armin gasps. Eren bites down on his lip and sucks till it sends a sharp twinge of pain through Armin’s jaw, making his hands scrabble at Eren’s shoulders. Pulling back, Eren kisses him again before he speaks. 

“Why do you have to go to _him_? Or Johan or whoever else when we’re right fuckin’ here, Armin, me and Mikasa are right here and it’s like we’re never _enough_ for you –” Eren gasps, his voice breaking; he tucks his face into Armin’s neck in a burst of rare, yet hardly uncharacteristic, shyness. “ _I_ want you.”

These words are pressed into Armin’s skin when they are spoken. 

“I know,” Armin says tiredly, because Eren wants to touch him and kiss him and fuck him but he doesn’t want to stay with him, not like how he wants to stay with Mikasa, and sometimes Armin feels like screaming. 

Neither of them say anything after that, and Eren falls asleep still curled around Armin like he wants to take Armin into his bones. 

Armin does not sleep at all. 

…

Armin expected the issue to die for lack of words spoken on it, like how they deal with most that could drive rifts between them. 

He didn’t expect this, and even though he’s had Mikasa’s stoic reassurances that this – this is alright, he’s still – 

He didn’t expect it.

Eren is hot inside, where he is clenching around Armin’s fingers, and Armin didn’t think he’d be the one doing this but after they’d begun kissing – actually kissing, the kind that lead to sweat and slickness – Eren had almost _shyly_ rolled his ass down on Armin’s lap, making a sort of questioning noise like Armin would _refuse_ –

“Oh, fuck, Armin, Armin, I –” Eren gasps as Armin works his middle finger further in, pressing up to Eren’s stomach curiously, searchingly… 

Mikasa is the one that moans when Eren shudders wordlessly, head tipping back as his eyes widen and his mouth falls open, a silent cry of shock. She is seated close enough to cage Eren between their chests, and Armin can feel the heat of her proximity at his legs and arms, in the glimpses of her that he gets over Eren’s shoulder. Pressing herself against Eren’s back, she thumbs over his cockhead, gripping his hair as he shudders and rocks back onto Armin’s fingers. 

“I should have started doing this to you months ago,” she says, tone composed. Eren’s head jerks from side to side, broken gasps spitting their way up through his chapped lips. “Enough that you’d feel it sitting across from him the next day.”

At this, Eren whines, back arching. Armin has fit in a third finger at this point, and both Eren’s wrists are encircled by Mikasa when she looks. She watches with a heated, inquisitive gaze when Armin crooks those fingers, making Eren writhe and choke. They have high pain tolerance after so much time training, which makes this easier than it would be, Armin thinks, and Eren chases after the pain, rolls his hips to catch the too-tight too-much stretch Armin himself can remember shying away from.

“Turn around,” Mikasa tells Eren, making the words an order, and Eren moans as he struggles to comply, flailing with sluggish limbs to adjust himself in Armin’s lap. Meanwhile, Mikasa is stripping calmly, revealing more and more of her strangely pale skin and foreign curves. 

The harnesses they’ve begun practicing with almost every day have left blue-purple crisscrossing lines over all their bodies, but on Mikasa they show starkly, creating inviting bruised curves that lead to the thatch of hair between her thighs, framing the slight weight of her breasts.

She is beautiful, maybe the most beautiful thing he’s seen outside of the book about the world, and how she does not reach for him – how she does not even look at him – while she settles herself in front of Eren burns him, twists under his ribcage painfully. Pouring some more of yellowish oil Sasha provides the trainees with manic smiles and an uncomfortable amount of ease into his palm, Armin slicks his own cock, watches how Eren shudders at the sound this makes.

“Are you…?” Armin asks hesitantly when the head of his cock bumps and catches against Eren’s ass. Mindlessly, Eren groans his assent, rolling his hips back and nodding frantically.

“Yes,” he hisses, “yes, yesyesye – oh, _fuck_!” Eren cuts himself off with a sharp curse when Armin manages to breach the tightened rings of muscle with the tip of his cock, and Armin squeezes Eren’s hips hard, stilling him slightly. His friend whines, hips jerking reflexively while Armin takes deep breaths, willing away some of the impatient edges of the heat in his gut. 

He doesn’t want to come too soon. He doesn’t want this to be over too soon.

Mikasa’s legs have been thrown around Eren’s hips, her feet just barely touching Armin’s sides, and Armin gulps, biting back a hurt sigh when her toes twitch against his ribs and she adjusts her thighs, putting more space between them. 

Eren takes this opportunity to push himself back onto Armin with a loud, drawn-out moan. It makes the breath freeze in Armin’s chest, makes it scramble, twice-heated and desperate, up his windpipe as pleasure explodes in the base of his spine, making his toes curls and his fingers dig tighter into the flesh of Eren’s hips. “ _Eren_ , oh please oh fuck, I –”

Armin cuts himself off, groaning and thrusting his hips up once, twice. And Eren – Eren _likes_ it, tips his head back and rolls his hips onto Armin’s cock like this isn’t the first time, like they’ve been practicing the best ways to move together for years –

Mikasa’s quiet sound of arousal draws Armin out of his thoughts, and he whimpers when Eren laughs, adjusting himself on Armin’s dick to grip Mikasa’s thighs in an easy, comfortable hold, no more thought put into the action then if he were brushing hair back from his face. Then he _pulls_ , until Mikasa’s rump is on Eren’s lap and his hands are between her thighs and she is making thready, helpless noises that flutter in the air and oh _God_ , they strike Armin somewhere deep, those sounds. 

“Fuck,” he bites out when she hiccups at whatever Eren’s fingers are doing, his hips jerking up without his permission and making Eren yelp, curse and heave himself back against him in a sudden push of his hips.

“Armin, Armin fuck wait, just – I need to,” Eren pants, voice cracked and hips grinding down. Then Mikasa’s hand is in his hair, pulling _hard_ , and Eren snarls, his hands sliding up to her hips suddenly. In one long pull, he drags her closer, until Armin can _hear_ the noises her body makes when Eren’s cock starts pressing her open, when he starts pressing into her. 

Her feet are touching his sides again, higher up for her position, and Armin holds his breath, thinks that maybe if she doesn’t notice the contact she won’t break it. 

The muscles in Eren’s arms ripple when he draws Mikasa into a steady rhythm of gyrating hips, and her feet flex when she draws herself upward through the strength of her core, settling herself in Eren’s lap not unlike the way he is in Armin’s. Her hands slip on Eren’s shoulders, the first time, before they grip hard enough to make his voice arch ragged.

She begins to rock her hips harder, affecting the rhythm of all three of them, and Armin sobs in a breath, tucking his face against the skin of Eren’s shoulder blade to avoid looking at how Mikasa will not be looking at him. 

“Armin…” Mikasa says quietly, barely audible over the sound of skin against skin and Eren’s meaningless vocalizations, and her fingertips skitter over Armin’s shoulder. Her voice is so kind, so loving, so _friendly_ and she’d never touch him for sex but she’s still _worried_ for him, because he’s her friend, because she loves him – 

Armin cringes away from the touch and bites his lip, bites the skin of Eren’s back as he grips his friend’s hips and fucks up, hard, harder, the fire in his blood beginning to flare outward wildly. 

“M’gonna –” he chokes out, because it’s polite, and he sounds _wrecked_ , sounds broken.

“Yeah,” Eren slurs, pistoning his hips between Mikasa and Armin desperately, “yeah, do it, come in me –”

And this is what brings Armin over the edge, shuddering, gasping frantically as he cants up into Eren and comes. Eren chokes over his moan, rutting into Mikasa in short, hard bursts until his chin rolls forward, noise caught awkwardly in his throat because it seems he is shameless about the sounds he makes until orgasm. 

There they all pause, gasping, until Mikasa makes a noise of discontent and shifts her hips. Eren enthusiastically slides from Armin’s lap to kneel in front of the bench they pushed close to the one Armin is sitting on, where Mikasa perches expectantly, knees spread and hands holding her up in a lazy shrug.

Without a word, Eren grips at her thighs and pushes his face against her cunt, lapping at it with little finesse but enough determination to make Mikasa’s limbs twitch.

Her head, which had tipped back at first, now rolls forward to allow her gaze to fall on Armin, and Armin slumps his shoulders, adjusting the pants they didn’t bother to remove fully with shaking hands. He can’t hold her eyes, something like shame and guilt and grief rising in his chest because Eren and Mikasa are in love and they love him and Eren wants him but –

Armin still isn’t part of what they have, and as he watches Mikasa arch and come – and she looks like a goddess, she looks so beautiful – he realizes slowly that he never will be, not when he sees how complete Eren and Mikasa become when they look at one another. 

“I –” Armin says, and his is the first word to break the post-coital silence. Eren ‘mmph’s from where he is slumped on the floor, head supported by Mikasa’s knees, and Mikasa frowns worriedly at him, a rising distress in her eyes when Armin shakes his head, bites his tongue, restarts. “I have to go.”

“What?!” Eren snaps to attention, hands scrambling for his abandoned clothes on the floor. “Why? Where? I’ll go with –”

“Eren,” Mikasa cuts in, and Armin could cry from gratefulness – almost does, eyes stinging dangerously – as he gathers up his shirt and jacket, stumbling from the quiet room they’d snuck into after Eren and Mikasa had approached him after dinner with Eren’s stuttered suggestion. 

He finds his way to the boy’s cabin unthinkingly, hands shaking as he undresses quickly and climbs under the covers, ignoring Jean’s curious, slightly worried gaze as he does so. The other boys don’t mention how early it is, and Armin can hear them quiet down with great effort when he wraps himself up in his blankets and lies facedown on his bed.

Their consideration just makes Armin feel worse, and when his shoulders start shaking and his pillow gets wet enough that the others can doubtlessly see the stain, they don’t mention that, either.

…

Bertholdt and Reiner and Berik were chosen because Berik had enough zealous faith for the three of them, and Reiner had a manner that screamed for trust even then, and Bertholdt had a quiet sort of ruthlessness that was so easily hidden by his sweet smile and nervous sweat.

Annie was chosen because she was the best, a position she despised having as much as her father despised her having it, knowing what it would mean for her. 

She remembers it, being chosen, in a hazy way where the edges of the memory grow softer the more time passes. She was chosen young, just like they all were, and had lived most of her life knowing what she was going to do. At ten years old go to Wall Maria wait for the attack sneak in survive survive survive enlist – 

They were chosen young so that they’d always be prepared, no matter what happened, no matter who they met – they would always be ready to finish what was started a century ago.

Nothing she was taught prepared Annie for this. 

“Shit, Annie, you’re allowed to go easy on me,” Eren fucking Jaeger grins up at Annie, his eyes glinting in the wavering sunlight.

“…What would be the point of that?” Annie responds after a moment, waiting until it feels less as if her heartbeat is poised next to her vocal chords. She is suddenly hyperaware of how she is straddling him, in a way that hardly seemed intimate a moment ago, but now Annie can’t help but notice how her hips are parallel to Eren’s lower stomach, that if she were to cant her hips back…

Blinking, Annie pushes those thoughts away, focusing on her reality. The reality in which Eren Jaeger will die soon, and it will be in direct relation to her actions.

“You’re supposed to be learning,” Annie informs him, swinging her leg up, around and off Eren’s prone form. His hand reaching out for hers in an automatic assumption she will help him up, Eren snorts, the sound made sickening by the blood from his split lip that has gathered in his mouth. 

After a moment’s pause, Annie clasps his hand and hauls him upright.

“Yeah, I’m supposed to be learning, but it’s hard to learn when I’m on my ass every few minutes,” Eren says, before he spits to the side.

Blood shines sweetly under light just starting to go dusky, stark against the greyish dust of the training ground they’re on. It makes hunger that feels like lust spark inside Annie, warming the cool detachment she has wrapped around her organs.

“…so you could slow down, it wouldn’t kill you,” Eren finishes just as Annie manages to pull her focus from the red splotch slowly soaking its way into the earth. 

Annie’s mind tick tick ticks over the words, her systems pausing to allow her room to make sense of them, and then she hitches, a brief stutter in her constant rhythm of play-acting. 

Eren Jaeger is asking her for mercy with wide, honest eyes and a smile that is too fond of her. 

There is a part of her that snarls in retaliation – how dare he lower himself like that for her? – and there is another that speaks before she can process what she’s saying.

“Fine.”

Annie stiffens as she recognizes her own voice buoying that word. Eren smiles wider.

\- 

When they’re wandering back to the cabins – and Annie is not walking as fast as she normally does, her pace slowing to match Eren’s, and no matter what she does she cannot convince her feet to move quicker – Eren sees Armin across the expanse of space, sees Armin standing near Jean, and looks away, hurt flashing across his face.

Annie frowns in confusion – she’d thought Eren and Mikasa were… No, the whole squad knows what Eren and Mikasa are. 

So then…

“What happened?” Annie asks, monotonous. Eren jumps as he looks from Armin to her, an odd flush darkening his cheeks as he frowns, scuffing his foot on the ground. 

“Nothing,” he mutters. He kicks the dust viciously. A dent is left in the dirt.

They both stop and examine this dent, Eren’s mouth moving at the corners. Silently, Annie waits. She’s become good at waiting patiently for an answer, after the three hours she spent with Bertholdt tangling and sidewinding his way through explaining why Reiner had started to…change. 

Annie shies away from this thought, doesn’t like how Bertholdt’s phrase ‘went native’ reverberated in her gut. Likes it less how this phrase rises to the forefront of her mind when she casts her eyes Eren’s way.

“We fucked him. Me and Mikasa.” Eren blurts, after Annie’s gaze makes him twitch and shift his weight. 

“…alright,” Annie says, when it looks like Eren is waiting for a response. There is a roil in her gut that does not manage to taint her voice; Annie swallows as it rises to the back of her tongue, swallows it away and pretends that she does not taste it as jealousy. 

A wheezy noise of frustration escapes Eren’s lips. “And I don’t know what went wrong or what I _did_ wrong because he just left. And.” 

He bites his lip. Annie does not watch him do so. 

“We haven’t really talked…since then, and I miss him.” Now Eren sighs, grind his heel into the dirt to deepen the dent he made. “He’s my best friend.”

This is said wistfully, and there are words Eren does not say that Annie can hear in the air following the phrase.

Annie sniffs, her nose plugged from the pollen weighing the air down, and scrapes the arm of her sleeve under her nose gracelessly, digging her heel backwards and feeling the dirt resist for a few seconds before, inevitably, it grinds and shifts under the pressure. 

“Have you told him that?” Annie asks, feeling…awkward, giving advice on a subject she finds so vast and unknowably foreign her cautious assumptions are indelicate gropes in the dark. 

She knows it doesn’t matter. If she does nothing and Eren’s relationships sour and fall apart, it hardly matters because soon everyone here – everyone, she reminds herself fiercely – will be dead. 

But.

Eren’s eyes are hurt as they trace the ground below him, and Annie is disgruntled by it, feels a suppressed sort of ache she hadn’t felt since she learned about Reiner’s condition rise inside her. 

“Sometimes…people need reminders about who they are to other people,” Annie says. “It’s easy to forget.”

The words taste of irony.

Eren brightens when she says this, one of his hands reaching for hers and squeezing it easily. Startled, Annie feels her shoulders hunch as she looks to where Eren’s fingers are curled with hers. 

“Thanks, Annie. For the fighting, too.” Then he brushes their shoulders together, easy, friendly.

Annie watches as he walks toward Armin, and she snorts to herself. 

“It’s easy to forget,” she murmurs.

She had never found irony funny.

-

“Are you a soldier?” Annie asks, approaching where Reiner sits in the night-abandoned training field. “Or a warrior?”

Reiner’s shoulders stiffen, and it looks like anger, a bit – warrior, then. Glancing back, he lifts a hand in greeting. “Annie.”

His voice is too loud, but Annie doesn’t chastise him. He’s had enough of being chastised.

Tossing herself down beside him, Annie splays her legs out in front of her. There’s an instinct, still, nestled in her bones, to resist relaxation, to keep her guards up – but this is Reiner, and if Annie is to trust anyone, it’s him. 

She is the only one who has known him longer than Bertholdt.

They sit in silence for a few minutes, until carefully, slowly, Reiner puts his arm around Annie’s shoulders. When Annie does not shake him off or pull away, he tightens his arm in a silent motion, drawing her against his side with a _thump_.

Sighing, Annie allows herself to be weak, tucked under Reiner’s arm and cradled by his larger size, by the knowledge that he’d die to keep her safe. His chest is broad and warm when she turns her face into it, and Annie fists her hands in Reiner’s shirt. 

He kisses her temple, an easy, unconscious movement. 

“You can’t tell Bertholdt, Reiner…” Annie starts, shifting to hook her arms around her knees, her legs folded beneath her. Reiner meets her eyes, sees the seriousness in them, and nods.

“Fine.”

“I understand,” Annie says, and it feels like excisioning diseased flesh from her body, like crawling out of her Titan form’s corpse, admitting to that. She is bare in those words, Eren a cyst over her eye that manages to warp her vision so much she is left fumbling blind. “I understand going native.” 

Reiner looks at her fondly, a corner of his mouth twitching up. “I know. We all do, Annie. We’ve all…”

They pause. Reiner is the one to break the silence, as he so often is with her. “This mission is fucked.”

Now Annie draws back, a flare of strong, bred-in resentment flaring at those words. It is instinct to pull back her lips into a snarl. “It _can’t_ be, Reiner.”

The boy beside her is startled, and Annie curdles a frustrated noise in her mouth. “It’s them or us, Reiner. It’s always had to be. _We_ didn’t start this, but we have to finish it. Or they will.”

There is a beat of silence, until Reiner laughs and rolls his shoulders, more easygoing with Annie than he thinks he can afford to be with others. “Yeah, and he’d kill us if we failed.”

A shiver works through her at the casual mention of Him, and Annie snorts, looking away. 

“There is that,” she agrees, a dry stab at humour. Because Reiner is a good friend, he laughs again.

Annie likes his laugh. 

…

“Why didn’t you…do anything with Armin?” Eren asks. 

Mikasa sighs. They are in the girl’s cabin, the girls having proved much more willing to hide an unlawful lover than the boys, it is after they fucked, and Eren is talking to her left breast, like he is ashamed of his curiosity.

Mikasa sighs again. He is never ashamed of his curiosity with Armin. 

It’s hard to know if it would be better to tell him the truth she knows he’ll see, or if it’s better to let it settle for another night. She keeps her silence, undecided.

Eren mouths at the skin he finds beneath his lips. 

“…Eren, you know Armin is going back to Jean. You have to know.” Mikasa pauses. Eren splutters.

“No, _no_ , I talked to him today, Mikasa. It’s fine.” He says this with such belief.

Mikasa does not sigh again. “Even if he’s with us again, it won’t be forever, Eren. We can’t be what Jean is to him.” Her words are gentle. She brushes hair from Eren’s forehead, tucking it behind his ear and scratching his scalp soothingly.

Silently, he curls himself closer to her, entangling their limbs further. She shifts to make the process easier, and once Eren has deemed them suitably interwoven he huffs out a breath and settles against her side again. 

“Mikasa?” he prompts.

“It would ruin me, Eren,” Mikasa says, hushed, quiet. “If I were to have him, and then if he just went back to Jean afterward… I would be ruined.”

Eren is frowning, his shoulders shaking. No, Mikasa thinks; Eren is _crying_ , his shoulders shaking. “Fuck Jean,” he whispers fiercely, “we’re better, we’d treat him better, why –”

A gasping sob breaks him off, and Mikasa strokes his hair, murmurs sweet nonsense to him. “I know, love.”

“It’s not fair that he gets to have Armin. Where was he when Armin was starving and we stole food, huh?” Eren spits these words, angry now. 

“Eren, the only person who gets to have Armin is Armin,” Mikasa says sharply; loyalty is one thing, degrading someone by thinking you can have them is another. “Who he gives his love to is his own choice.”

The words are necessary poison, bitterness and venom on her tongue and she thinks of her cracked knuckles, how once the splits in her skin had been so deep and wide and red that she’d been taken to a doctor worth a damn, for once. She’d gotten them helping to dig a grave for an old woman that no one knew and no one loved that they’d found dead in a field. 

The woman was going to be tossed to the dogs until Armin volunteered to bury her. 

Eren and Mikasa had helped, of course – had done most of it, really – and it had been winter and Mikasa’s skin seemed different from theirs, didn’t seem to take to the cold as well as theirs. 

Her knuckles had hurt, and how her thoughts feel now is not unlike how her knuckles felt then.

Strong fingers dig into her back as Eren snarls, tucking his face into the place between her breasts and muffling the sound of his hurt, his anger, there. Behind him, Mikasa holds up her hand.

She still has the scars.

 

…

_The roof is hot_ , Eren thinks, _and rough_. 

His second thought is _oh Maria my leg it’s gone my leg_ –

His third is that he is going to die, and what a fucking way to go, no Titans killed nothing to show for a dead mom and a stupid dream and a wasted life and – 

Eren can hear Armin screaming. It feels like swimming through that firewater, like climbing mountains, like crawling with one leg on a hot roof with rough, uneven tiles whose edges dig into his stump mercilessly and _oh fuck he has a fucking stump_ , but he crawls until he reaches Armin. 

Armin, who is in a Titan’s mouth, and Eren didn’t know what difficult was until Armin is out – that part was easy, instinct, even with one limb gone – and he is reaching for Armin’s hand – 

The Titan bites down.

…

It’s easy to decide to die, Armin thinks dreamily, dizzily, as he looks over Mikasa’s 3DM gear, once you’re past the difficult parts.

A slice down his forearm should do it, and if he can manage it, the other arm, too. He’s already strategizing as he asks for a blade to be left behind, looking down at his left arm, marking the middle. 

Maybe he should do it on his right. In honour? 

Mikasa’s swift rejection feels like cruelty, for a few moments, until it turns into a wretched, miserable sort of hope that she’ll stop him, one he swallows back down like bile.

He wants to beg. He’d beg, if Connie wasn’t there.

Mikasa’s eyes tell him begging would do nothing.

-

And then Eren is alive.

Eren is alive inside the Aberrant corpse’s neck and he is choking and he can’t breath and all he can hear is

_raw meat ground between rough stones, and the Titan chews, and Armin can see inside he can see Eren’s_ skull _being_ crushed

His breath catches, hitches, and even when he touches Eren’s skin Armin is still half unsure, because he saw Eren die he saw him ground up – 

Didn’t he?

…

Armin’s salute has never been quite so straight, so aligned as it is now as he bargains for their lives, and Mikasa thinks with tired pride that she never doubted that Armin would succeed at this, if anyone could. There is no tremble in his body as he faces the canons, the people willing to fire those canons with no guilt.

Behind her, Eren grins, a quick thing that passes almost as soon as it appears, and his fingers brush hers. Mikasa smiles behind her scarf.

That is all she needs to quiet the part of her that had been raging since Armin had told her Eren was dead, the feral, wounded part that could wreak havoc and raze monsters. It had still been seething silently, hidden beneath her ribcage, but for now it settles.

For now it sleeps.

\- 

Pixis descends like the grace of Maria, holding the wrist of the sack of shit that would kill them just as Mikasa is tensing, futilely spreading her arm in front of Eren and wishing Armin was closer. 

Grace, and punishment, because though he saves them he ends up putting Eren into more danger than before with a task Mikasa can’t help but think is doomed, and Mikasa boxes Eren in with her shoulders and voice when she says she is going with him. She doesn’t mean for it to come out sounding quite so plaintive, so pleading, and she doesn’t mean for it to sound like an option she is presenting, but Eren snarls at her, rejects her, anyway.

He’d been doing that more and more. Mikasa remembers how desperate he’d been for Armin, how easily he’d lost himself in Armin and forgotten about her completely – until she had to remind him, always reminding him instead of him remembering – and Mikasa is struck dumb and silent.

She is assigned to be with him anyway.

It is a bitter victory. 

…

Armin is the one who finds Johan’s body, after.

Half of it, anyway.

(Later, he will think hysterically that it seems going by halves is a theme in the 104th’s deaths.)

He thinks distantly that someone is screaming, he thinks distantly that his throat is hurting; he realizes that he is the one screaming when he feels Jean’s hands on his shoulders, clutching at him, crying a name into Armin’s neck that Armin can’t hear over the – 

_It sounds wet. It sounds like grinding raw meat between two stones, when the Titan bites down on Eren._

_The right arm seems to fall for a long time._

_Armin freezes._

_Everything freezes except for the Titan’s jaw and it moves up and down and meat rips and Armin hear every muscle tear and bone break and Armin can see_ inside – 

_He screams_.

Vaguely, he recognizes that Jean’s hands are now over Armin’s, that Armin’s hands are clasped around Johan’s face tight enough to push the flesh of where his bottom jaw isn’t anymore up and away from bone, he needs to bathe he needs to breath there isn’t any air he can’t _breath_ – 

“Please, please, Armin, I need you with me, I need you to calm down, please God,” Jean’s voice breaks in his ear.

_Delicate_ , Armin thinks, laughing. _I can break him I can chew him up and swallow him whole I can_

Armin leans forward and pukes. Jean takes this as an opportunity to yank Johan’s head from Armin’s grip and Armin looks at Johan’s abdomen and looks at where his legs should be but Armin can’t fucking find them in the rubble and looks at his right arm and

It’s the same as the one Eren lost and Armin starts to laugh and Armin pukes some more.

Jean cries, in the background, as he stands back and gives up.


	2. Chapter 2

They were told, after Trost, that only one person was allowed to join the escort to where Eren would be kept, and Armin had hugged Eren without a word, gripped Mikasa’s shoulder with a smile.

She’d hated how easily he’d given up time with Eren for her, hated how silent the walk was now. Corporal Levi still smelt like Titan blood, and she didn’t trust his eyes on Eren, didn’t trust his eyes at all. Those eyes moved to scour over her, slowly rising to meet the challenge that she didn’t bother pushing from her gaze. 

Levi raises an eyebrow. Mikasa does nothing. She knows she could do anything for Eren. 

Eren is placed into a prison cell with little more than a bed and a piss-pot, and Mikasa frowns, mouth twitching into a grimace. Holding up his cuffed hands, he shakes his head, asking her without words to do nothing. 

It takes more strength than Mikasa would have imagined, to bite her tongue and step back as they lock him in, even though she knows this is necessary. The guards shuffle out the doors to take watch, and for the most part they are alone, barring the silent presences of the Commander, the Corporal, and the person with glasses and an alarmingly loud enthusiasm for Titans.

Mikasa glances back at them and wonders if she should speak.

“What is it?” Eren asks her. Levi cocks his head to the side and the Commander leans forward, eyes more intent than they were before.

With a sigh, Mikasa steps ever so slightly closer to the bars. “Armin wanted to kill himself.” 

This is not how she should have opened the conversation; it should have been with something gentler, she chastises herself, watching how Eren’s eyes widen and his shoulders begin to shake.

“He said it was about not being eaten by the Titans, but it wasn’t.” Mikasa pauses, and Eren hunches in on himself like he knows what’s coming next. “It was about you.” 

“Does he still…” Eren’s voice shakes as he speaks to the mattress. “Does he still want to…”

“I don’t know,” Mikasa answers, trying to ignore the way those words make her heartbeat stop, pause, restart. “It’s like he had to show me before I could see, but now that I do, it’s always there.” 

She is honest. She is always honest with Eren, and Eren is always honest with her.

Mostly. They are mostly always honest.

“Fuck. Fuckin’ – Armin, goddamnit!” Eren spits, using his ever-reliable strategy of turning his sadness into anger and determination. Already Mikasa can see it hardening in his eyes, the renewed drive to get out, to get back to her or back to Armin or both. “Why are you with me, Mikasa? Why aren’t you with him?”

“Because he is with Jean.” The words have the same effect on Eren as a blow would, and he double overs with it, clenching his teeth.

The Corporal and the Commander are very interested indeed. The third just seems to be holding themself back, biting their lip and bouncing from foot to foot. Their brown hair bounces with them.

“…Are you sure?” Eren asks resentfully after a moment; though he hates it, he won’t deny that Armin will be safe with Jean. Everyone had seen the way they are together enough to know that. 

Mikasa nods. She’d seen Jean lurking out of the corner of her eye, near them, and when Armin began walking away Jean stepped out of the corner he stood in and held his arm out. Armin stumbled over and tucked himself under said arm, one hand fisting Jean’s shirt when they began to walk together. 

“I think that’s enough visiting hours for now, don’t you think?” Glasses croons, tapping the Commander repeatedly on the shoulder. The Commander seems largely unfazed despite how his body allows itself to bend to that pressure, turning his eyes to Mikasa and nodding. The last thing Mikasa sees is the gangly figure launching themself at the bars of Eren’s cage and poking their head in.

They don’t seem like they want to hurt Eren, however, so Mikasa turns and leaves.

…

It’s not that – it’s not that Eren likes pain.

(Except that it is.)

It’s not that Eren likes pain but when Corporal Levi aims another kick at his stomach, knots his bony, strong hands into Eren’s hair and pulls his head back, Eren feels a fierce thrill in his gut. Half of it snarls to bite Levi’s throat out, the other wants him to pull more, kick harder, _force_ Eren to accept – accept what, he didn’t know, but the only thing Eren can rely on is himself and his own orders and he can’t, he isn’t – 

A hand shakes his head roughly, and Eren is drawn back to himself with a gasp, and he is staring Levi straight in the eye, and Eren can feel what is shown there and has never felt so bare. 

Enough understanding flickers in Levi’s eyes that Eren knows it hasn’t gone unnoticed, shame boiling under his tongue. Strangely, there is no sudden gathering of disgust in Levi’s gaze, but rather a slow settle back into carefully maintained disinterest.

( _That doesn’t mean it wasn’t there,_ a voice that sounds like a Titan’s smile hisses in the back of his mind gleefully. _That doesn’t mean you aren’t disgusting._ )

He continues his beating, and when Eren almost can’t keep a _moan_ from his lips – and that wouldn’t help, that would make things worse – Levi’s hand is there, clamping his jaw shut. 

It makes Eren shiver.

-

When Eren is slumped forward, blood and spit dripping from a lip he can feel fattening, he glances up to see Mikasa being held in place by Armin, her glare pointed directly at Levi’s figure. It does something to him, Eren thinks, seeing how Mikasa can break the bones of men twice her size with ease but all it takes is Armin’s light touches to keep her from leaping from her seat and brutally murdering Levi.

Eren sways, head spinning, thinking maybe his healing isn’t quite fast enough to catch up to however many head injuries he has now, and Levi – who is still talking, though Eren can’t focus on the words – grips his shoulder, keeping him upright. 

Mikasa’s glower deepens at the touch, muscles tensing and Armin tensing with them as she leans forward. Now his arm is around her waist.

If it were any other time, Mikasa probably would have been flustered by that, pulling up her scarf to cover the bottom half of her face. She doesn’t even seem aware of the touch, though, gaze riveted to Levi and eyes – 

Eyes a reminder as to why Mikasa is strongest. 

Eren shifts his weight enough to get her attention, Levi’s fingers tightening on his shoulders like the Corporal thinks it’s a failure in balance. When Mikasa’s eyes flick to him, he attempts a grin, though he gives up when his lip protests that action mightily and shakes his head instead. 

He can see Mikasa’s jaw tighten frighteningly from here, but she leans back, her aggression expressed in the feral posturing of her shoulders, the loose, wide stance of her body as it settles in her seat. Armin gives Eren a grateful nod.

When Eren tips his head back to help the coagulated blood in the back of his throat slide down, he meets Levi’s eyes for the second time, and – 

And it makes Eren shiver again, what he sees there. 

…

Levi can feel the kid’s eyes on him the entire ride to the new HQ so far, and it’s making him…testy.

Not that that’s the only thing the brat’s doing to test Levi’s patience – all that Levi can read from Eren now that whatever monstrous instinct in him has gone to sleep is that he’s needlessly _determined_ about everything, can only be silent or unnecessarily loud, and is prone to rambling off into painfully naïve speeches if given the opportunity. 

Petra adores him already.

Petra would. 

Levi’s shoulder blades tingle. Eren’s gaze has intensified, then – somehow. And Levi thinks he knows why, knows what thoughts are crawling around the kid’s fucked up skull, and that is a whole other world of issues that Levi can’t deal with on horseback while sleep deficient. “Keep looking and I gouge your eyes out, shithead.”

There is a catch of breath, a stutter, before a loud “Yes, Corporal!” sounds out through the air, and Petra laughs.

The kid did the salute on horseback. Levi would bet money that the kid did the salute on horseback, judging from the reactions of his squad, and then he grinds his teeth in frustration because the kid _did the salute on horseback_ in reaction to Levi threatening him.

It’s not like his eyes wouldn’t grow back – it’s not like Eren would have thought of that, Levi thinks to himself – but there’s something more than the general combination of hero-worship and fear that Levi is used to in Eren’s reactions, one that seems to render him immune from normal societal responses to Lance Corporal Levi, and even though he knows what it is, that doesn’t stop it from unsettling him.

It’s dangerous, is what Levi thinks, combined with the shitstorm that was the courtroom. 

If Levi had known how Eren would have reacted, what it would do to the kid – he wouldn’t have done what he did, and the abhorrent taste of regret for his own decisions has been sour on his tongue for hours. There is a reason he follows orders instead of giving them, and the reason riddles his bones like self-loathing, makes his hands itch with disgust for himself. 

The back of his neck prickles.

Eren’s eyes are on him again.

-

Levi doesn’t know how to broach the subject so he doesn’t – besides, he has no goddamn doubt that if Eren wanted to have a nice chat about it Levi would have to become Titan chow to escape the conversation – and as they settle into the rhythm of cleaning the mouldering castle, it seems as if he might not have to.

The kid might stiffen up if Levi gets too close, might give him glances when Eren thinks he isn’t looking, might be shier and more skittish with him than he is with anyone else in the castle, Zoe included, but. He isn’t _pushing_ , and he doesn’t seem worse off for Levi’s…mistake. 

So Levi is confident that he might not have to. 

Eren’s relentless intensity, while irritating, lends itself well to menial tasks like sweeping and dusting and scrubbing; once Levi had shown him the different cleaning supplies and what to do with them, all he’d had to do was point Eren in a direction and watch him swarm like a particularly hygienic whirlwind. It had made Levi twitch, a bit, how Eren didn’t know what bleach was, had never seen a mop because he was used to horsehair brushes, cheap soap and buckets. The poverty of Wall Maria was no big secret, nor the poverty of the refugee landfills, but it’s strange to see it demonstrated in Eren’s wondrous reactions to things those in Wall Rose and Wall Sina found familiar.

Like now, with Eren squatting on the floor of a room that could be good sleeping quarters once it isn’t hazardous with germs, looking on in awe at how well the bleach-water combination was working on the stain he was scrubbing – Eren isn’t fond of mops, apparently. 

It’s a brownish, large stain. It makes Levi shudder. 

“What’s the smelly stuff called again?” Eren asks, eyes completely riveted on the slow reveal of a cleanly floor. Levi snorts, because of course the kid would find something like that fascinating, and wanders further into the room.

He watches Eren’s shoulders go tight at the sound of his footsteps, Eren risking a quick backwards glance over one shoulder that ends quickly when he meets Levi’s eyes and whips his head around to focus on the stain, now small. 

“Bleach,” Levi says around the bitter taste in his mouth. He is rough around the edges and crass and has a reputation but none of his people are _afraid_ of him, not really, and seeing how the kid flinches at his voice makes something guilty and dark roil in his gut. 

Eren nods, oddly frantic, and doesn’t say anything after that, progressively growing clumsier with his hands the longer Levi stands in the room.

Levi sighs. He’s going to have to talk about it.

“Oi,” he drawls, and Eren has been here long enough to recognize that tone. Placing the brush in the bucket, Eren stands to face Levi.

“Yes, Corporal?” Eren asks, loud but not as loud as his default, whatever’s going through his mind dampening him.

“I said it was going to be when you fucked up, badly. Not whenever you drop a fucking sponge.” Levi’s voice is too much of a bark, he thinks, watching a flush bloom in Eren’s cheeks.

_Shit_. The kid – and he is a kid, soldier or not. Levi isn’t one of those dumb fucks that thinks killing a Titan successfully makes anyone an adult – is 15; Levi should not notice the blush as much as he does.

He shouldn’t have _wanted_ , when he saw Eren looking up at him with wide, wide eyes over a bloody nose and a split lip, bright and hazy with pain and something else. Something that made the kid’s pants tent and made Levi realize that he was dancing through a field of mines and secret traps, and he may or may not have contributed to – something. A psychological issue. 

Eren has a lot of those. 

( _We all do_ , Levi thinks, before he pushes that thought away. Putting Eren inside the _we_ makes him an equal companion, and that is…dangerous.)

Eren swallows thickly. Levi can hear it from here, can see it in the bob of Eren’s throat. 

“I know, sir.” 

“So what the _shit_ is this, then?” Levi spits, exasperated, stepping forward to watch Eren step back.

“I – sir,” Eren fumbles, eyes darting around the room like he’s looking for an escape.

“Answer me, Eren.” Levi cannot stop himself from making that a command, hot frustration at the entire damn situation twitching in his fingers.

Eren mumbles something incomprehensible, shoulders slouching defensively with his eyes fixed firmly on the ground.

“I’m not a fucking bat, Jaeger.” 

“I don’t _want_ it to be just when I screw up!” Eren repeats. His eyes scrunch closed, his shoulders hunch, shame paints its sticky fingers across Eren’s features as his flush deepens. “And I know it’s gross and wrong so I haven’t – but you –” Eren makes a strangled noise of helpless frustration, one hand clutching at his hair.

“Who told you that?” Levi snaps out, the first real thread of anger winding through his bones, marring the relief that Levi didn’t strike a complex, just a kink. Because of course it would be something like that, some ignorant shit who found out what Eren liked, what he wanted, and made it shameful for him. 

Levi is too, too familiar with that.

Eren’s brows knit as he looks to Levi, eyes going soft in surprise. Levi sighs.

So Eren was the ignorant shit, then.

“It might shock you to know that consensual violence in an intimate setting isn’t uncommon, and it isn’t wrong.” Levi pushes his hands through his hair, half-relieved that all he needs to do is explain a fetish. _Half_ relieved, because discussing a sexual fetish with Eren won’t help how Levi looks at him and sees something to want.

Eren, surprisingly, accepts this with ease, like he’d been prepared to hear those words for while. Then he meets Levi’s eyes, and the bottom of Levi’s stomach drops.

_Shit._

“So if it isn’t…” Eren trails off, eyes dropping to the floor before rising to meet Levi’s in an unconsciously coy action. 

“Just get your damn girlfriend to smack you around a bit when she gets here; it’s not like she’s choosing any place but the Scouting Legion,” Levi snaps. Eren is trying to get them into dangerous territory, and though morals go lax in the military – ‘no fraternization within the ranks’ meant shit all to them, along with several other regulations that didn’t account for the desperate neediness of survivors and their guilt – they aren’t this lax. Not enough for cradle robbing.

Eren recoils like Levi suggested he skin the girl alive when she gets here; a desperate expression, edging on hysterical, twists his features. “I can’t do that!” he hisses, and for the first time Levi can see in Eren something Levi could grow to fear, if the kid polishes it up a bit. “I can’t ask her to hurt me!”

The words are spit in Levi’s direction, bull-headed, angry, and Levi feels more like someone who just touched Wall Rose in front of a zealous Wallist than anything else.

It leaves Levi struck silent for a few moments, his mind humming, backtracking to see where he went wrong. Then he remembers the girl’s expression the day in the courtroom, the feral, obsessive protectiveness that made her lips pull back into enough of a snarl Levi could see her teeth. 

Levi hums, understanding slotting together piece by piece. “But you can ask me?” 

Toeing at the ground, Eren shrugs. “S’not like you care.” 

The shock in his widened eyes is almost more satisfying than the crack of his skull against the wall when Levi surges forward, hand on Eren’s throat to push him back. 

“Don’t fucking tell me what I care about, brat,” Levi hisses, well aware that his temper has flared and he’s allowed himself to get too close, that he needs to step back and calm down but this _kid_ just fucking – “You were _entrusted_ to me. You’re one of _mine_ , my people, and I goddamn care about my people.”

His breath is on Eren’s neck, enough to make Eren shiver, and what he says next surprises Levi. “Do you take care of your people too?”

It’s a clumsy, unpractised manipulation, all breathy and too obvious, but Levi snarls out a grin. So Eren is slightly cleverer than they gave him credit for.

Then he mutters ‘fuck it’ and leans forward, bites Eren’s lips hard, hard enough for Eren to make a vulnerable noise, edging into a moan when Levi tightens his hand around Eren’s throat. “Yes,” he breathes into Eren’s mouth, unthinking and wanting and expecting guilt that fails to arrive. “I do.”

Stepping back, Levi backhands Eren, listens to how that draws another sound from his lips.

“Corporal…” Eren murmurs, and the open, fragile _gratefulness_ in his voice makes Levi want to retch, makes Levi want to hold Eren down. 

“When you’re done with this shithole,” Levi says, waving his hand to indicate the room they’re standing in, “I’ll be in my room.” 

He leaves the room to the sound of Eren’s gasp. 

-

Eren comes to him after the spoon incident, which – not surprising, not really, but Levi was…unsure, how good of an idea it was, and he’s more unsure now. The more time he spends with Eren, the more levels of fucked Levi discovers, and his handling of the kid has had to grow more and more delicate for it. 

From where he’s standing, Levi watches with eyes he hopes are impartial as Eren grinds against his shin, the boy’s face tucked into Levi’s hip and Eren’s teeth picking at the skin there occasionally. The breath Eren draws sounds like a sob, and the moans he gave when Levi was…taking care of him were frenetic, edging more toward hysteria than pained pleasure.

A hand with several torn fingernails already half grown in rests between Levi’s feet, fingers twitching occasionally. Levi steps down on them, a test, and the action reverberates through Eren’s entire body as he does sob, huddling closer to Levi’s outstretched leg, rolling his face into the divot of Levi’s hip to hide. 

It’s enough to make Levi grab Eren’s hair and yank him back, pulling his leg away. Eren’s thighs squeezed around his shin for a moment; Levi growls and twists his hand.

Another dry sob. 

“Eren, look at me.” Levi’s voice is flat. Eren shakes his head, tries to move closer to Levi’s leg. And this is – this is enough, alright, because Levi’s not a sadist, though he’s been what his partners have wanted him to be often enough, and this isn’t about what it usually is.

Because Eren comes to him to feel controlled, to have the white-knuckled, determined grip he tries to keep on himself removed forcefully and know that he won’t be lost for it. To be broken down but built back up the same.

But tonight, this is about punishment to Eren, and Levi never agreed to punish Eren for what Eren thinks he needs to be punished for. 

Levi does not think an accident that rattled a few nerves but didn’t hurt anyone deserves punishment. 

“Eren, look at me, or this doesn’t happen again,” Levi says, and Eren _wails_ at that, sounding half-mindless and broken. _Fuck_ , Levi thinks; he shouldn’t have done this tonight, he should have seen it would do more harm than good right now. Levi’s trying to alleviate the kid’s self-loathing, not justify it with bruises. He tries again, carding his fingers through Eren’s hair with a gentleness that Eren flinches away from. “Please, Eren.” 

The sound of the word ‘please’ in Levi’s voice startles Eren into doing what he was told, but their eyes only meet for a moment before Eren focuses vaguely on Levi’s cheek, over his shoulder, above his head. “You’re looking in my direction, Eren, you’re not looking at me.”

Eren shakes his head, a meaningless, torn noise tripping from his tongue and his chin tucking down to his neck. Sighing, Levi changes tactics, dropping to his knees so that he and Eren are at eye-level.

“Hey.” Levi grips Eren’s chin, tipping his face back up. “What happened today was an _accident_. I did not consider it a fuck up, and I didn’t want this to be punishment.” Eren flushes at that, closes his eyes to break their shared gaze in a move that reminds Levi how _young_ he is. “But you did.”

Slowly, slowly, Eren nods. Levi kisses him, slow and gentle and kind, and Eren makes a wounded noise, trying to scramble backwards. Gripping both his shoulders, Levi licks at Eren’s lips – licks, not bites, be gentle – until Eren softens into the hold, though he doesn’t kiss back. Doesn’t reach for Levi, just…

Lets him kiss. 

Pulling back makes a soft, wet sound, and Levi leans his forehead against Eren’s. Simple affection, even if the kid’s got himself convinced he doesn’t deserve it. “Why?” 

Eren leans back. Levi clasps a hand around the nape of his neck and draws him back in, pushes their lips back together in another chaste kiss. “Hey,” he murmurs into it, “hey, just answer the question, you can’t tell me anything that’ll shock me.”

“Because I can’t – because I transformed for a fucking spoon, I don’t know how –” Eren breathes in. It catches roughly in his chest, and Levi moves closer to rub his hand up and down Eren’s back. “I’m – I don’t even know what I am, I can’t –”

His voice breaks on the last word. Levi picks him up and puts him on Levi’s bed, shoving him further to the side to slide in beside him. Pressing along Eren’s side, he throws an arm over the boy’s waist. Eren is frozen stiff for a few minutes, until he relaxes, softening into Levi’s hold. 

“You are Eren Jaeger,” Levi begins quietly, “Graduate of the 104th trainee squad, member of the Scouting Legion. Your best friend is Armin. Your best friend and lover is Mikasa. For unknown reasons, you have the ability to transform into a Titan, and that does not make you inhuman.” 

Eren is deathly quiet beside him, so Levi raises himself on an elbow to look at him. He’s crying, absolutely silent, one shaking hand pressed against his mouth. Levi grabs it, pulls it away, covers Eren’s mouth with his own.

They make out like Levi hasn’t since he and Zoe were fresh meat and couldn’t keep out of each other’s pants, till his jaw aches and his lips are swollen and Eren has fumbled his way around Levi’s dick enough to get him off. As a sign of gratitude, Levi slips under the blankets to suck Eren off, quick and easy because the kid was still hard from before.

Settling beside Eren as he catches his breath, Levi raises an eyebrow when this time Eren is the one to turn to him, wrapping himself around Levi and knotting their limbs together. Levi hasn’t actually _slept_ with a person in years, especially not after he’s slept with them, so the feeling of a sleeping body near his own, whispered, rhythmic breathing fanning his chest, is foreign.

Not unlikeable, he muses, combing Eren’s hair absentmindedly, but foreign.

…

Jean tries not to be jealous of Eren. He does.

But the closer the newest members of the Scouting Legion get to the castle, the happier Armin becomes, and it serves as a harsh reminder that Jean is tits over ankles in love with this scrawny, spindly boy and he will only ever be said boy’s third priority. Jean feels his expression twist into something angry, maybe a little bitter –

He was Marco’s most important, and Jean thinks miserably that he probably still would have been better off falling for him.

“Jean?” Armin’s voice shakes Jean free of those thoughts – thoughts about Marco never lead anywhere good, not anymore – and Jean grunts, without turning his head in Armin’s direction.

It’s petty, but Jean’s never claimed to be anything else. 

“Are you alright?” Armin asks, the honest _concern_ in his voice making Jean grumble, feeling guilty and then feeling frustrated that he can’t even stay _angry_ at Armin. And Jean has a fucking right to be angry. 

“Yeah,” Jean replies. Curt. 

“Oh…” Armin trails off, soft and hurt and he’s trying to slow his horse now, put some distance between himself and Jean.

“Fuck. Armin.” Jean bites the words out, and he knows he sounds like a prick but Armin trots up beside him anyway. “I’m not –” Jean trips over his words, feeling like an idiot. There’s so much more to it all than whether or not he can be vertical and functional for a day, a black, probing, live sort of sadness that’s settled around his lungs and heart, crawling up his throat sometimes to tangle up his tongue and force words he’d never say otherwise from his mouth. It winds its way through every thought he has, eats away at his words, and Jean… Fumbles. 

Armin waits, patient and kind and Jean knows that if Armin were in his situation he would have found the right words by this point, done what was needed to fix himself and moved the fuck on and sometimes how goddamn _outstripped_ Jean is all the time makes him want to _choke_ –

“I’m not okay right now,” Jean finishes lamely after a couple awful seconds of listening to himself stammer over his syllables. 

“Okay,” Armin says. His voice is prompting. 

_In less than an hour we’ll be where Eren is and I’ll only exist half as much to you then as I do now_ , Jean thinks about spitting, because Armin wants answers. _I’m tired of being third but I’d rather be third than nothing and that’s a fucking difficult position to be in._

_Marco is dead and I needed you and you weren’t there._

“Just fuckin’… I don’t know. Marco’s dead. The world’s shit. Your best friend is a dick and I have to deal with that fuckery for you.” Jean shrugs, his voice a stiff, pre-made nonchalant that makes Armin raise a brow at him, making it clear he wasn’t fooled. 

“You don’t have to,” Armin starts. “I don’t want you to deal with stuff you can’t handle for me.” 

“I can handle Eren just fine!” Jean sputters indignantly, and ten meters ahead of them Mikasa whips her head around to glare through Jean’s eyes and into his soul. And because Jean is sort-of over his crush on her, and because they’ve sort-of become friends, he holds up his middle finger and waves it around in a few slow circles. 

Mikasa’s glare intensifies until Jean thinks he can feel himself start to go into cardiac arrest from the sheer force of it, and then she flips him off herself, turning back around once she’s done.

Jean smiles despite himself, and feels prickles along his neck. Turning his head, he sees Armin grinning at him, and the line about Eren was bait, wasn’t it… 

Goddamnit, Armin.

He nudges his horse, urging her to walk impossibly closer to Armin’s before he leans to the side and kisses the corner of Armin’s mouth.

Armin makes a pleased, surprised noise, turning his head and moving his lips against Jean’s for a few moments, until the catcalls of Sasha and Connie behind them get to be too much and he pulls away with a blush. 

\- 

The Titans scrabble at the base of the tree Jean perches on, Armin behind him, and explosions are sounding out in the forest behind them and Jean can barely look at Armin because Armin almost _died,_ which – they’re in the Scouting Legion, Jean should be prepared for Armin to die at any moment, he knows this, he knows the stats, but –

He’s already lost Marco, and the thought of Armin being dead and him alive makes something dark and poisonous and frightening coil in the base of his gut. Frightening if only because it offers an easy answer, and Jean’s not sure he wouldn’t if they entered the Walls again without Armin. 

It’s a stupid thought, and Armin would kill him for thinking it, but Jean’s feeling a little petty, a little pissed, so he thinks it anyway. Thinks about razor blades down his forearms and taking too many of the pills the nurse gave him for the nightmares and –

The Titans start running. 

…

Annie doesn’t feel regret when she feels the woman’s spine break under her foot, doesn’t regret the taste of taste of human blood in her mouth and doesn’t regret killing the last one, either.

Her or them. The world is her enemy.

But when Eren strikes out – and strikes _hard_ , Annie thinks approvingly; he’s improved – and howls, Annie sees some of what he used to be in his eyes. The madness, the hunger, the pain, it’s all familiar because she felt it herself, they all did –

But Eren strikes out and he is hurt not because of his regenerating injuries but because of her, and…

Annie does not let herself finish that thought.

She does not regret what she’s done. The world is her enemy. 

( _Eren isn’t_ , a traitorous voice whispers in her mind, _Eren has never been your enemy, no more that Reiner or Bertholdt, and you would die before hurting them._ )

Fighting Eren puts an instinctual thrill in her blood, one that sharpens rather than deadens her resolve to finish things today. Get Eren away from the species that he is not, bring them all home and she and Eren could spar without the hatred, like –

Like when they were trainees, she thinks, and this thought puts an odd quiver in her belly.

And Eren is good, but Annie is better, so Annie feels a fierce thrill of victory and no surprise when she kicks hard enough to take his head away, when Eren’s Titan form crumples to the ground.

She can hear Mikasa approaching from a distance, Annie cursing in her head as she crouches next to Eren’s prone form. It shortens the amount of time she has to get Eren out of his meatsuit, and Annie would rather do it cleanly, would always rather do it cleanly.

They were friends, before. 

So she is careful with her teeth as she closes them around the flesh of the nape of his neck, careful when she rips away the first few layers of it, feeling around for the hardened lump of Eren’s body. Mikasa is screaming, and if Annie were the sort to bother she would roll her eyes.

Mikasa cannot be what Eren needs. She’s much too human. 

Even more carefully, she bites down on his abdomen, feel ribs and organs strain under her teeth but no breakage. Pulling him from the cradle of steaming flesh requires a few gentle tugs, before Annie tips her head back to slide him into her mouth and hold him under her tongue, to keep him from bouncing around and striking his head on one of her teeth.

Once, when they were smaller, Reiner and Annie had been in similar positions, but Reiner was never as much as a forward-thinker as she and she got a concussion from one of his teeth, armoured like the rest of him.

Her father nearly banned her from seeing him again. 

Annie begins to run, hearing Mikasa begin to gain on her, and Annie curses the lethargy she is starting to feel in her legs. It had been easy to forget how good Mikasa was at what she’s chosen to do when Annie had no longer been near her every day, but Annie is soon reminded as she feels blades scrape along skin she barely manages to harden in time. 

_No_ , Annie thinks, _I’m going home I’m taking Eren and Reiner and Bertholdt and we’re going home, we’re_ –

Mikasa falls back, and that worries Annie more. The girl is not a strategist; she would never retreat without the tactical advice of another soldier. 

Two soldiers will make this more difficult than one, especially when she feels exhaustion seep up from her legs into the rest of her, blurring the edges of her mind.

She’s been in Titan form for too long, too often today. It’s a niggling worry that pushes Annie to run harder; she does not want the exhaustion to eat away at her human mind, doesn’t want it to slip into the hungered, frenzied madness she only barely remembers. 

Then a short, dark-haired man swings into view and Annie prepares to take care of him, just like she took care of the others – she does not guess at why she didn’t put as much effort into killing Mikasa – but he’s fast.

He’s faster than she is now, and soon Annie is slumped against a tree and there’s rising ride of despair in her mind as she thinks _no, nonono don’t take him away don’t steal him from us again don’t_ –

Her cheeks burn as they’re sliced open, her eyes burn when she feels her tongue lose Eren’s weight. Annie does not bother holding back the tears, not anymore, because they’d been so _close_ , so close to going _home_.

Eren had to be the coordinate, he had to be – what else would it be? – and Annie had him.

If it wouldn’t draw the lost ones in the forest towards her, Annie would be wailing, howling. A bloom of something she cannot call anything but grief stirs beneath her chest, and Annie sits as she listens to the humans retreat, to the stumbling, brainless footsteps of the lost ones around her. One wanders by; she wonders if it will try to eat her.

She wonders if she will try to stop it if it does.

Then Annie tightens her healed jaw; of course she will stop it. She will survive, she will take Eren, and she will bring them all home.

Annie forces herself back to her feet, making her way back to the Walls.

…

Annie isn’t coming into the tunnels with them, and Eren feels the distance she must walk to get to them like a wound, denial rushing through his skull.

Because Annie is his friend, Annie taught him and cared for him and he cared for her and he doesn’t _care_ what the Female Titan’s fighting style was like, Annie is his _friend_ –

Annie meets Eren’s eyes when Scouting Legion members surround her, and her eyes are still and calm, even with a gag in her mouth. Time seems to slow for Eren as they share gazes, caught in what he can’t read in them anymore, and he almost misses how Annie’s lips start curving into a smile before he is yanked back by Mikasa.

The bodies of his friends are enough to solidify the truth in his chest, and it feels oddly like it’s crushing his lungs, his heart. 

And then he watches her kill again, stamping down on lives like they’re insects, and Mikasa and Armin are too brave and too stupid, and Eren is angry enough that his Titan form feels like relief.

His body matches his mind, monstrous and angry and bloodthirsty, and though Annie is better at fighting than him she is not better at holding grudges, and she is not better at using anger like he does. 

Every strike feels righteous.

\- 

Mikasa, in the end, is the one that takes Annie down. It’s hardly surprising but it still makes something bitter roil in Eren’s gut, human again, because Mikasa didn’t give two shits about Annie.

Mikasa didn’t feel the betrayal as deep as he did. As Armin did.

Eren’s almost numb to the revelation that there are Titans in the Walls, because Annie’s the Female Titan and Eren can turn into a Titan himself and what’s one more travesty in the world, but he is not numb when Reiner and Bertholdt ask to take him aside. 

Uneasiness rises in his gut, his thoughts spinning chaotically over the carefully composed suspicions about his squad members that he rejected as thoroughly as the idea of Annie’s betrayal. _Please no_ , he prays in his mind half-heartedly as he follows Reiner over to where Bertholdt is standing. _Please not them, not after Annie, not them too_.

The Armoured Titan reveals himself, the Colossal Titan standing behind him – and they were his _friends_ , Eren thinks in agony, he loved them – as they tell him to come with them. To join them.

It makes disgust like nausea boil through his gut, and his Titan form feels more right than it ever has, an extension of the fire in his bones. 

He fights. He loses. 

…

Erwin can feel his humerus ground down to shards in his arm, feels his hand crushed between two molars and he has felt pain before, but never quite like this. 

“Forward!” he yells when it looks like his troops are going to attempt to save him, and Erwin wants to bite out a laugh at their loyalty, when he throws them at the Titans like scraps of meat for dogs. The Titan shakes its head, yanking Erwin through the air and causing a bloom of red pain behind his eyes that nearly robs him of consciousness. 

_Sorry, Zoe, no victory sex this time_ , he thinks dizzily, a pang of – regret, maybe, sadness, going through his chest when he thinks about how they’ll mourn him. Levi won’t be able to comfort them, he’s sure, and then Erwin is reminded of Levi, his thoughts dancing through his head quicker than ever with the inevitability of death hanging over him. 

God, Levi. Erwin smiles, and thinks that he and Zoe should have been braver when they had the chance, bringing him in between them like they wanted. He’d walked in on them often enough, given them enough opportunities –

Maybe Zoe would take care of it for Erwin. 

He hopes so, and then he smiles again because he can only find it in himself to hope when he is about to die.

The Titan grinds its teeth together, severing Erwin’s arm crudely at the shoulder, Erwin falling to the ground with a thump. Crouching in an eerily childlike manner, the Titan hunches over him and tilts its head in way Erwin would call curiously if it were human, others of its kind, strangely, rushing past it and the meat it has. Inhuman eyes are trained on Erwin’s prone form. 

“Ahhhhhhh,” it starts, placing a hand beside Erwin’s body to lean over him more fully.

Oddly enough, Erwin is not afraid. He feels closer to peace than fear. 

“Aberrant,” Erwin breathes through his teeth at the half-light in the Titan’s eyes that must be what allowed it to force the rudimentary vowel sound from its mouth.

Drool drips from the Titan’s mouth onto Erwin, and it has the cloyingly sweet smell of rot to it. “Daaaaannnnnnn….” 

A Titan is stumbling toward them; Erwin turns his head to look in the direction of the footsteps, sees another Aberrant twitching its way over. 

The Titan over Erwin whips its head up and releases a howl, a loud, feral, frightening thing that sends drool and bits of flesh flying from its mouth. Drawing to a stumbling stop, the Aberrant looks at Erwin.

Another howl, more fearsome this time, and Erwin can see the Titan’s long fingers begin to dig into the dirt beneath its palm. The Aberrant runs past them.

_Zoe would have come by this point,_ Erwin thinks dizzily, blood loss beginning to catch up with him, _seeing two Titans communicate_. He can’t bring himself to feel any awe, and he’s sure Zoe would be greatly disappointed in him. 

The Titan leans its face closer to Erwin’s. Its rank breath becomes the only thing he can breathe. “Daaaaannnchooo,” it gurgles, and Erwin freezes. No. Impossible. It can’t –

“Daaannnchooooooo,” the Titan croons now, its rough, inhuman vocal chords twisting the sound into something fearful. 

“Yes,” Erwin responds, because his mind is left blank in the wake of the Titan’s vocalization – but it isn’t a vocalization, it’s a word, a title – “Yes, it’s your commander here.”

The Titan releases a breath that Erwin would call a _sigh_ – a sigh, and this is what makes Erwin marvel at the impossibility of his situation. 

“Daaaannnnnchoo,” it repeats for the third time, before it places its other hand near Erwin’s body and bridges itself over him, tucking its head between its hands and looking at Erwin upside down, wiggling its toes as it straightens its legs.

It gurgles again, a series of meaningless sounds, but the tone – the tone pitches upwards. Like happiness or encouragement, and Erwin realizes that the Titan is _protecting_ him. 

“Thank you, soldier,” Erwin gasps, breathless. The Titan burbles, air squeezing past harsh vocal chords and tongue waggling until it tucks the appendage back into its mouth. The tip of its tongue pressed against the ragged wound where Erwin’s arm should be beforehand, and Erwin wondered if that would shatter the mentality of the Titan, but all the Titan did was lap at it, once, twice, a third time.

Erwin keeps his eyes on the Titan as he lies still, waiting to see if the Titan would revert back, but the Titan just wiggles its toes occasionally, burbles every so often, and Erwin is soon distracted by the itching of his wound. The itch becomes a burn, the burn intensifies into something much worse, and Erwin must bite down hard on his tongue to keep from screaming.

Looking to the wound he hadn’t been able to glance at yet, he chokes past horror that rises in his throat as he sees the red flesh twitching, bubbling and knitting itself back together. The flesh seems to heave up from the wound, and at the sound of Erwin’s disturbed groan, the Titan gurgles, sticking its tongue out to lap at the wound again. 

Within a few minutes, the burning stops, the healing stops, and Erwin is left with stump that’s nearly half as long as the arm used to have.

Erwin does not weep, but he moves the stump out to touch the forehead of the Titan. “Thank you,” he says again, the second time he’s thanked this Titan.

The Titan’s mouth curls into a smile, and Erwin does not find it fearful. 

\- 

Erwin must lose consciousness, because he is awoken by the sound of a desperate screech of his name, and Erwin feels an outpouring of both relief and anger within him when he recognizes it as Zoe’s – he’d told them to stay behind, that he didn’t care that they could move through the pain.

“DON’T WORRY, ERWIIIIIIIN!” The voice thunders through the air, and Erwin feels hands at his ankles, yanking him out from under the Titan. Erwin looks to see that it’s Willem, one of Zoe’s squad members, scrambling backwards and heaving Erwin’s weight with him.

The Titan roars, violent again, and Erwin watches Zoe manoeuvre themself close to the Titan’s neck, uncaring of the burns on their body.

“Zoe, wait –!” Erwin calls out, but Zoe has already sliced the nape away, the Titan crumbling forward and beginning to steam.

Erwin feels his expression twist, crumbling for a moment as the skeleton is revealed. 

“Ahhh, Erwin, I understand! I understand how it hurts, but it’s so much more important that you live!” Zoe wails, gripping at his shoulders and pressing their face close to his, their brown eyes widened dramatically as they yell these words into Erwin face. “Don’t keep your grief from me, I know better than anyone how you feel!” 

As they continue to holler, Erwin feels relief soften his joints, Willem shuffling them both quickly onto horses. Erwin’s limbs tremble, his knees buckling twice in the short distance Zoe dragged him across, and once he’s mounted, Zoe clampers up behind him and takes the reigns forcefully, kicking the horse into a gallop. 

“Erwin, you have a stump!” Zoe, despite being inches from Erwin’s ear, continues at the same volume as before. The rest of the Scouting Legion is further ahead – he sees Eren crumpled, unconscious, over Mikasa Ackerman’s horse, and breathes a sigh of relief – so Erwin allows himself a moment of humanity, a moment of weakness. Turning his head, he drags his nose across their cheek and leans into Zoe’s hold, breathing in the dirt-blood-sweat scent of them. 

“I know, Zoe,” he responds, quietly, straightening up as they approach the rest of the Legion.

“Your arm was bitten off at the shoulder,” Zoe informs him, as if Erwin might not have known. “Why do you have a stump?”

“The Titan healed me. I don’t know how,” he says, and listens to Zoe’s delighted, if confused, vocal outburst in response. “It called me Commander.” 

This cuts Zoe off suddenly, their voice choking. “What?”

It’s the first time in a long time that Erwin can remember Zoe’s voice being so quiet.

“It recognized me after it bit my arm off,” Erwin begins, his voice slurring at the edges and his mind hazed with exhaustion. “It stopped another Aberrant from coming near me and then it called me Commander. It licked my wound to heal it.”

Zoe is silent behind him for quite some time, and Erwin doesn’t push, focusing instead on looking over the people around him, estimating casualties. They aren’t close enough to safety for anyone to bother calling out to Erwin, in surprise or relief, but Erwin does gather many questioning looks. His stump gathers even more. 

But no fearful ones, and Erwin feels it in his chest, how he can do the impossible and be met by his people with relief and curiosity, when he has no doubt that that wouldn’t hold true for another.

“…he was protecting you,” Zoe says at last, and their voice is hoarse with grief, trembling along the edges. “He was protecting you for me and I killed him.”

Their voice breaks on the last word, slipping to let Erwin hear self-loathing under it all, and with his intact hand, he squeezes theirs. “You had no way of knowing that.”

“I should have waited,” Zoe responds, and then they don’t say anything at all. Erwin can feel drops of water striking the back of his neck, and Erwin bites his tongue to keep from attempting to comfort them.

He does not, and never will, understand Zoe’s relationship with Titans, and this would have struck them deep, deeper than Sawney and Bean, deeper even than Eren. 

There is nothing Erwin can offer them that would be comforting.

…

Annie dreams.

-

Annie dreams about many things, but it always circles back to the feeling of rain on her scalp and shoulders, how the mud of the training ground stuck to her feet all the way up to her ankles as she kicked, punched, kicked, again, again, practice –

Her father’s voice, in the background, constant murmurs urging her up on her feet, growing louder and louder the longer she’d let herself lie in the mud.

She would practice till she dropped, some days, till her stomach gave out or her limbs shook too much to hold her weight anymore. Those were the only times she could ever remember her father looking at her with something like happiness, the times she proved she could survive.

-

The voice isn’t always her father’s, just as the dream isn’t always the training ground behind her old house, and right now – today? What day is it? Has it been a day? For a moment, Annie is caught, muddled, before the dream sluices away any uncertainty – she is on a rock, in water.

More water than she has ever seen in her life, stretching out beyond the limits of her eyesight, roiling and heaving around her ankles in a way that Annie would call ‘playful’, if the movements didn’t feel so massive. So dangerous.

Annie whoops, the murmur a rise-and-fall of easily ignorable sound, and twists in a full turn, stomach opening up at the bottom at all the _space_.

God, she wishes Bertholdt and Reiner could be here. 

“…with thousands upon thousands of different species of coral in one area, the Great Barrier Reef was sometimes known as the Ocean’s Treasure, though –” The voice drips from the sky, and Annie freezes as the murmurs become less easy to ignore. She knows this voice, she knows this voice and she isn’t really at the ocean, is she –

The water laps at her ankles, distracting her, and Annie crouches down to watch the surface delightedly, dipping her hands into the icy-salty liquid and then dunking her head in afterwards, for she is alone, and there is no one here to think her weak for it. She snorts and huffs indelicately when water gets up her nose, pausing to laugh at herself and re-tie her hair at the nape of her neck. 

She wonders what would happen if she were to jump off of her rock, swim away into the dark heaving movement of the water below her.

If it might feel like going home. 

“…many superstitions, particularly surrounding the Bermuda Triangle – fuck, Annie, why the fuck am I even bothering?!” The voice abruptly becomes _loud_ , searing the sky as it erodes into a sob.

This sound makes Annie frown, shifting her weight from hip to hip. She doesn’t like the sound of it doesn’t think the person should be crying when it disturbs her so –

_I wonder about that, too… Why didn’t I kill you then?_

Annie’s eyes burn and she finds she can’t move at all, anymore, the sky above her a perfect, cloudless blue and the water beneath her an angry, violent grey.

“You can’t even hear this! You’ve locked yourself away in there and – and,” Armin whines through his teeth and the whine scrapes at the back of Annie’s ribs, wholly _wrong_ , there is a reason she beat up the trainees who tried to make Armin their meat in second year and it is because Armin’s voice should not sound like that.

Not when it is so well-suited to kindness.

“And it’s so _stupid_ , Annie, but I still want to find a way to make this all better, y’know? A – I don’t know, another Female Titan. Proving that it’s not you and we got it all wrong. And I can’t, because there isn’t making this any better, is there? It doesn’t get better, it just keeps going and going and more people die and –” Armin gasps and the wind blows and a wave taller than Annie crests on her rock, curling over her before she is soaked in brine. “I want to believe you’re still our friend, even after all of this.”

Armin laughs. It is a bitter, aged thing, and Annie can’t quite match up its sound to the bright boy who used to tell her secrets about the world beyond the wall whenever comments on her nose had been loud enough to make Annie flinch at dinner.

“You and Reiner and – Bertholdt, was that even real? We’d – Annie, Bertholdt and I used to stay up for _hours_ after the others had gone to sleep –” Armin is choking the words out between sobs now, Annie can hear the wrinkling of pages held in clenched fists, can almost feel _herself_ again – “And we’d talk about everything, about Shadis and everyone and about the world, we’d talk so much about what the world was going to be like once we got it back –” Hiccups, the last few words repeated till the phrase gains enough traction in his throat to complete itself. “Was that all part of your plan, too, Annie?”

_No_ , Annie wants to say, but she can’t find where her lips are. _No, none of it was part of the plan all of it was real I promise I’m sorry I_ – 

-

“Get up!” Her father roars. He is angry now, angry at her. “No breaks!”

Annie feels the mud swimming around her ankles slop into her shoes as she raises her foot in a kick, punch, kick, again, again, practice –

-

Armin’s voice becomes the closest thing to a constant Annie has in her head, his voice the only thing solid enough for Annie grasp onto, to heave herself out of the subconscious, protective stream of mismatched images and take a few gasps, to feel the passage of time and weight of reality before she is lost again. 

Her image of the world around her is patchwork, great gaping holes of information Armin leaves out of his discourses as far away from her as satisfaction is from a Titan, but Annie takes comfort from it anyway, likes repeating what she knows to be reality when she can never be sure, the rest of the time. 

She is at the Scouting Legion’s HQ; she is in more trouble than the system has penalty for – acceptable, expected, Annie hardly cares anymore.

Bertholdt and Reiner are not, and this is what brings Annie closest to full awareness, when she learns in slow, patient trickles that their identities are known, that they almost got Eren but didn’t, that they weren’t captured –

It is a testament to Armin’s character, that he tells her that with a sort of empathy in his voice, even when they are alone and he can be as bitter as he wants, as angry as he wants. He tells her like he is still taking their friendship into consideration, and Annie –

Annie remembers that the world is her enemy, but she is having a hard time remembering why. 

“…I don’t know what to do about that, though. Eren and Mikasa never fight for real, and neither of them will tell me what’s wrong. I know it’s something that happened recently, though; it might have to do with the Corporal?” Armin’s voice is soothing, and Annie’s mind can grapple with the concept that the sound is coming from beside her and win, giving her the barest – barest – sense of her physical surroundings. Sometimes he reads to her, big tomes about the ocean or mountains that spit fire or a place called the Savannah, sometimes he updates her on the Scouting Legion’s coming and goings, and sometimes he just…talks. Rants. 

It seems today is going to be the latter. In retrograde, Annie flits her mind over those words, parsing out as much meaning as she can from his words, his voice, the change and drag of his pitch. 

Ah. Eren and Mikasa. A fight. Because Eren’s fucking the Corporal? No, just guessing, there was a question mark…

“…and it’s not like I want him to write me a daily report on whatever he’s done, but I wouldn’t mind… He just gets so _angry_ when I try to check up on him, like I’m trying to own him, but I don’t think wanting to know how his day went when we don’t manage to screw that day is bad.” Armin’s voice is the sad, self-conscious waver Annie has never heard him use around anyone capable of responding, and it takes Annie only a few seconds before she realizes that he is talking about Jean. 

He always seems sad, when he talks about Jean. 

Annie remembers when Mina had a fling with Jean, how it had been torrid and dramatic and Mina had clung to Annie like a swooning maiden for days afterward, sighing and sobbing and acting like a grieving nuisance until Annie relented and turned herself over for what Mina had called a ‘girl’s night’. 

Annie remembers Mina, with a jolt that passes through her numbly until it doesn’t, and suddenly Annie can feel her organs again because it feels as if they are on fire. 

\- 

Annie wakes up.

…

“Why the fuck did you stop me, Mikasa?” Eren yells, face red and fists clenched with the space of her entire room between them. “It was the same Titan! It was the one that –” his voice breaks, and Mikasa feels an echo of his pain in her chest, “the one that got Mom, and I could have killed it, I could have ripped it apart!”

Sasha, from where she’s sitting in the top bunk, moans pitifully and squishes the pillow tighter to her ears, and though Mikasa can’t see the girl’s face, she knows Sasha is blushing. Mikasa feels a pang of regret for that, knowing the girl didn’t like dealing with the…complications that came with sexual relationships, and wonders if she’ll be able to reason Eren out of her room and outside, where his anger will have more room to stretch. 

One glance at Eren’s eyes dismissed that thought from her mind immediately.

“Eren, there wasn’t any time.” Mikasa tries logic first, though she knows this will likely prove futile, as it often does with Eren. “We needed to move out with the rest of the Scouting Legion.”

Eren hisses out a breath between his teeth, pacing back and forth across from her and twisting his hands into his hair. That is a physical tick he picked up while he was here without her, and it disturbed Mikasa at first, seeing a physical habit in Eren that she hadn’t witnessed the genesis of. It was only after a few sweaty-palmed, nervous conversations with Eren that Mikasa learned it came from the time Eren spent with Levi, though Mikasa hasn’t seen Levi do anything like it yet. 

“But –” he starts, and Mikasa feels a stirring of impatience, of annoyance, inside her gut. She loves Eren, she loves him with more than her whole self, but he can be thick skulled and stubborn and obnoxious and oblivious and she _saved his life_.

Mikasa raises both hands to cut him off, and Eren is no so far into his anger he doesn’t recognize what this means. “I saved your _life_. You would have died; there were too many Titans.” 

“I don’t need your _protection_ , Mikasa!” Eren is yelling louder now, his voice reaching higher with his temper. Sasha appears to be seizing on the top bunk. 

“Then protect yourself for once in your goddamn life!” Mikasa spits, annoyance escalating into venomous anger. “And then maybe I won’t fucking have to!”

Eren is stock-still when he looks at her now, and though he’s said worse things to her, Mikasa feels strangely like she should backtrack, pluck those words from the air and swallow them back down. “…Eren…”

Huffing in a breath and wiping his sleeve across his nose in a deflective gesture Mikasa recognizes from when they were children, Eren stalks past her, bumping their shoulders together as he makes for the door. She reaches for his wrist and he shakes her off roughly, biting out a fierce “Don’t _fucking_ touch me” as he does so. 

The door is loud as it slams behind him. He’s going to see Levi, probably, and Mikasa can’t stop the gut rot feeling of jealousy.

She tries to stop this thought on most days, but as the jealousy spindles its way into something worse, Mikasa can’t help but wonder if she’s losing him. To Levi, to Armin, to life.

“… _That_ was very dramatic,” Sasha says, and she sounds so very pained.

Mikasa doesn’t respond for a few moments, fiddling with her scarf. 

“Yes, it was,” she sighs, spreading herself out on the bottom bed. She will fix things in the morning, after they’ve had time to settle.

Sasha swings down and shoves Mikasa to the side, lying down beside her and throwing a leg over her hip. “But you two will be fine. It’s pretty much like the sky is blue, isn’t it? Some days it’s all stormy and grey, but in the end it always goes back to blue.” 

Nodding, Sasha snuggles Mikasa, and Mikasa passively accepts it, having long grown used to this behaviour during their trainee years. “…You know, though, you could just go after him now. We all know where he is.”

Waggling her eyebrows, Sasha gives Mikasa a grin, and Mikasa shakes her head. “I think I should let him –”

“My dad always said that if you’re going to fight with someone, give ‘em all the fight at once, not in trickles, because then you’ll still have it inside you, which isn’t good.” Sasha interrupts, and now that she’s decided on a course of action, she sits up, starting to bounce on the bed as she looks at Mikasa with wide eyes. “C’mon, Mikasa, you guys are the power couple! The be-all-end-all of the 104th trainee squad! The parental figures! Think of the children, Mikasa!”

Mikasa stares at Sasha for a few moments, wondering again why she feels any sort of affection for this girl. 

“Mikasa!” Sasha bursts out after a couple seconds of silence, saying her name like it’s the only thing that can answer all the questions in the world. 

“…Sasha,” Mikasa responds, and Sasha huffs out a sigh, tossing herself down beside Mikasa again.

“Fine, be that way, but if you guys break up –” and there is a terrible crack in Sasha’s voice, one that makes Mikasa frown and haul the girl closer instinctually, “If you guys break up –”

“We won’t, Sasha. This won’t break us,” Mikasa says reassuringly. Sasha sniffles.

“Good. Sometimes I think you guys are the only constant in the world, you know?” She sounds soft, sad.

“I know,” Mikasa says, and because Sasha’s shoulders are still trembling, she gives the girl a kiss on the forehead. 

Sasha falls asleep smiling.

**Author's Note:**

> acceptable? continuable? what think?


End file.
